Printing services web sites allowing a user to access the site from the user's home or work and design custom products for personal or commercial use are well known and widely used by many consumers, professionals, and businesses. For example, VistaPrint Limited markets a variety of printed products through the site VistaPrint.com, such as business cards, postcards, brochures, holiday cards, letterhead, announcements, invitations and the like. As an additional service to customers, some printing services sites also offer mailing services, including the individual addressing and mailing of printed pieces to a list of names and addresses provided by the customer. Printing services sites offering mailing services may also offer customers the opportunity to purchase or rent custom-generated mailing lists of prospective customers, typically based on customer-specified geographic or demographic targeting parameters such as zip codes, household income, or hobbies.
Modern print services sites offering mailing services typically receive the electronic file of the customer's product design, which may have either been uploaded as a finished design to the site or created directly on the site using online design tools provided by the site, and receive one or more electronic mailing lists of addresses to which the customer desires the printed products to be mailed.
The fulfillinent of a customer's mailing services order typically involves the use of multiple printing systems. An offset or digital print press is initially used to print the text, images and other product content that is common to all of the mail pieces in the customer's order. After the common content has been printed, the printed pieces are then individually processed by a variable printing system that prints a different name and address read from the associated mailing list on each piece. Modern commercial variable printing systems tend to be highly automated and incorporate internal data storage capabilities for storing and retrieving individual addresses from an internally retained list for printing as an order's individual mail pieces are moving through the variable printing system.
Known variable printing systems, however, place certain limitations and restrictions on the human operator and require careful operator attention to ensure that the individual mail pieces in the orders are addressed properly. The operator must be careful to match each physical group of printed mail pieces with the corresponding electronic mailing list and must be sure that each group of pieces is introduced into the printer in the proper sequence and that the proper mailing list associated with the order is available in the variable printing system memory, ready for use, and selected by the printer operator before the printed products are introduced into the printer. While this process is generally adequate when the number of mail pieces in an order is large, the burden on the operator and the possibility of a problem is increased if the mailing service provider is dealing with a large number of orders for relatively small quantities of mail pieces. When many orders for small quantities are being processed, the checking, monitoring, and verifying activities by the operator tend to result in pauses in production so that the variable printing system is not being used to its maximum capacity. Any mismatch between the product and the mailing list can result in mis-addressing which could cause the delay and expense of the mailing service provider having to reprint an order again on the offset or digital press or in mail being sent to the wrong recipients.
There is, therefore, a need for systems and methods that increase the amount of time the printing system is actively operating and simplify the task of the system operator.